


The Tacit Trip Home

by Elekrii



Series: Fully Bloomed PIKFICS [1]
Category: Pikmin (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Brittany has Aunt Vibes, Camping, Canon-Typical Behavior, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Death, Emphasis on Olimar's Family, F/M, FANDOM-NEWBIE FRIENDLY, Family Struggles, Fluff, Hivemind Pikmin, Lore coverage, Louie isn't a complete nutball, Major Character Undeath, Mentions of Olimin, Minor Character Death, Multi, Olimar is a Sad Dad tm, Olimar's Son is an important character, PIKMIN 1 AND 2 SPOILERS, Pikmin will die, Possible Olimin story arc, Pre-Pikmin 3, Set during Pikmin 3, Tension, The Pikmin are a hivemind, The President is absolutely a complete nutball, sick days
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-24
Updated: 2020-11-24
Packaged: 2021-03-10 08:03:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,949
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27700070
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elekrii/pseuds/Elekrii
Summary: - PIKMIN 1 AND 2 SPOILERS- VERY FRIENDLY TO THOSE UNFAMILIAR WITH PIKMIN (HOPEFULLY)- ALTERNATE TIMELINE + ADDITIVE HEADCANONS------[C1 Excerpt] He is stuck in a snowglobe, between fall and winter. ‘Back then’ and ‘whatever happens next’. . . ‘Whatever happens next’ doesn’t quite feel like any big accomplishment. It feels like a lifeless cliche, now that he’s at home. Nothing could ever amount to the beauty of that. . . That distant, lush planet; nothing will excite him the same, leave him with the same veteran scars, abandon him. He misses the feeling of being a wild space-captain adventurer, just as he fears the beast in the brush. He misses the mystery and the wonder of something bigger than him. . .Lost relics of a past planet, once alive, and he’ll never figure it out. He can’t, because he’s at home. [. . .]So what happens when he finds that all he's set aside for the people he loves most is. . . dying?Follow suspiciously ill Captain Olimar as he returns to PNF-404 for the final time, under the threat of the planet's destruction in the face of corporate greed and. . . Something else.
Relationships: Brittany & Olimar's Daughter (Pikmin), Louie & Alph (Pikmin), Louie & Olimar's Son (Pikmin), Louie & The President (Pikmin), Olimar & Alph (Pikmin), Olimar & Brittany (Pikmin), Olimar & Charlie (Pikmin), Olimar & Louie (Pikmin), Olimar & Olimar's Daughter (Pikmin), Olimar & Olimar's Son (Pikmin), Olimar & The President (Pikmin), Olimar / Olimar's Wife (Pikmin)
Series: Fully Bloomed PIKFICS [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2025790
Comments: 6
Kudos: 21





	The Tacit Trip Home

_It’s quiet:_

These are the first words to tumble out the dark corner of his tired mind, no more than a whisper of attention brought to themselves. Nonetheless, they pierce through, persuading him to hold his paper-cupped coffee with a minutely firmer grasp. 

It’s quiet. He can hear the idle grumble of Hocotate brand machinery churning several hundred lengths away, all in all a muted, rusty scream. The universe is at its standstill; the gentle barrier between the fall and the winter is perpetual—They are left in a snowglobe. He, Olimar, insulated and isolated, sipping his coffee—feeling appropriately stuck. 

It’s too quiet. 

At some point in Olimar’s life, this would be a blissful realization. He would be out and about this very park, morning papers in hand. At some point in Olimar’s life, he found joy and intrigue in the morning papers. At some point, well. . . Points aside. He’s only enjoying his time away from his employment, while it lasts. He lets out a weighty sigh and sips his drink; it’s a good thing to be away from outerspace. . . That beautiful void has changed him too much. Here, this empty planet has everything he needs—A wife. Two kids. _Coffee_. Sounds to distract him from circular thought patterns, such as “ _I wouldn’t need this, if I didn’t get my promotion_.” All appropriate to adulthood.

His phone rings. The balding man flinches, deliberately hurling his coffee halfway across the park table. A curse flees from him, because nobody is there to morally stop him. He has the right, after all—Affording native coffee was a new luxury. He’s wasted his third cup in the past decade. It could have been his fourth, if not for his boss.

It’s his wife who had called him, as the screen notifies. He immediately answers.

“Yes, dear?” He questions, hand with phone to pointed ear, and the other rubbing at his large head. The tone of the answer clearly states how pitifully he stares at the dripping mess in front of him.

“Hi—Hi, honey.” Her voice is just as beautiful as it’s always been, inflected with the energy of somebody who never accepted the concept of aging. She looks different, in person. “I just wanted to let you know that. . . ( _Yes?—No, Maggy, dear, you can’t do that_.). . . That dinner’s on the table. I made your favorite!”

“Thank you, dear. You’re the best wife I could find on the thrift-shop shelf,” Olimar jokes, not at all in a condescending manner. 

She laughs and coos. This makes Olimar forget all about the spilled coffee. “You silly old man,” she simpers. “How is your walk going?”

Silence. Overwhelming silence. He hears the way his boots grind into the icy concrete , and he tries to stare through the table at them. Life is much different, now, just as a meal doesn’t taste the same after a day in the fridge. That’s not to say he doesn’t enjoy having food, but. . . Oh, it’s less enticing. It’s riddled with thoughts of something fresh— _Cruel_. To say that the man isn’t afraid of sleep is a lie, through and through, yet he would trade nothing for those dreams. The taste of adventure is hot and metallic. _Home_ is more akin to cold dessert pie—He can’t live on sweets, anymore, for some reason, no matter how much he needs the treat.

“Honey?-“

“I spilled my coffee, dear. I’m very alright, though; it was cold coffee, you see.” _Crunch_ , _crunch_ , his boots grumble.

“In the wintertime?”

“It’s not wintertime, yet. The beetles are still out.”

Her affectionate sigh crackles through the phone. He hears something about men and how they are. “Alright.”

“Alright.” _Crunch_. 

“. . . I bought lottery tickets, again. I thought you might like to scratch them with me, again. You know, back when-“

“Back when I was fixing spaceships and you were struggling to find a job, so you took all the money to-“

“Exactly!” She chimes, laughing. He likes how he can hear her smile; it’s something that he missed. Space e-mails were text only. He can’t help but miss the times they shared in person, too. There was something inherently better about only having to worry about money, alone in a shoddy apartment with the girl he loved—And then the children. Stars, what they haven’t done for him! . . . And he _left_. His job _tore them apart and left him tattered_. Everything is off, now that he’s back, and he detests himself for lusting after something different from the same—From what he loves. Loved. Likes. Needs to love. Painfully misses, unable to tear away from, unable to find.

“Alright, we’ll desperately rip through a few. I hope that you win, dear,” Olimar purrs. 

“I’ll get the big one. I’m positive.”

“You say th—“ He winces. “Yes. I’m positive, too.”

“Are you okay?” Her voice, as soft as down, isn’t tense with anything but worry. It’s a warm whisper, floating along the electrical breeze. At this, she guilts him. 

_At this_ , he only digs in further.

The ground. . .

. . . _Snaps_ under his feet while his held breath breaks all the same. _It sounds like shattering glass_. The squeak of his heel shrieks like howling wind against a metal carapace—It’s goading—Oh, _Fortune_ , it taunts him! It plays with him, threatens to pull away the last of the hair on his head—All an allusion to the past. The _change_. The breath is heavier in his lungs than it ever has been since he’s made it home, and he is glad that it isn’t with blood. To think the noise alone had brought it all back— _This_ is what he-

“Olim-“

He hoarsely interrupts, equally abrupt, fawning a misplaced laugh, “Did I hear our daughter, earlier?”

“Uh, yes. Yes, she’s on the couch with me and Oliver and Louie.”

“Louie’s over?” He twitters, weakly, genuinely, this time, with his pleased eyes wide. He’s more surprised than he’s been in a long time. It’s _been_ a long time. Louie was full of surprises, back when they were stuck in space, and now there had been too much space between them to talk. . . Well, Louie was a man of few words. 

“Yes, he-“

“Splendid! I shall be there in a moment!” Click, and all too late, “. . . _I love you_.”

How could he have forgotten to say those words? He’s never forgotten, before. . .

The fog of his sigh clouds his vision, dancing about in the air not unlike the falling leaves. 

Glitter in a snowglobe.

He is stuck in a snowglobe, between fall and winter. ‘Back then’ and ‘whatever happens next’. . . ‘ _Whatever happens next_ ’ doesn’t quite feel like any big accomplishment. It feels like a lifeless cliche, now that he’s at home. Nothing could ever amount to the beauty of that. . . That _distant_ , lush planet; nothing will excite him the same, leave him with the same veteran scars, _abandon_ him. He misses the feeling of being a wild space-captain adventurer, just as he fears the beast in the brush. He misses the mystery and the wonder of something bigger than him. . .Lost relics of a past planet, once alive, and he’ll never figure it out. He can’t, because he’s at home. 

With his loving wife. 

His children. Their dog.

His boss.

Occasionally Louie. Does he feel the same?

It’s such a pitiful number of people to know. The hole in his heart has hidden itself deep; he can’t drink in the company without feeling that he’s forgotten somebody else.

. . . “Am I truly alright?” He murmurs, poking his red-gloved fingers through the diamond-shaped holes of the parkbench. Olimar makes no move to stand. Truly, he does wish to come home and meet with his co-Captain, but. . . He needs. . . Just some time. Time to catch his breath. Breathe. Reminisce and remind himself that it doesn’t matter as much as it did.

With disinterest, he tries to fit his finger through the table’s windows from below, and wiggles it about. Anxiety nips at him. He almost can’t place it.

Is it wrong of him to fondly recall the bird-headed serpent, how it shot out of the ground, taller than the sky, screaming, skewering and devouring his childlike compatriots with its long beak?. . .His throat feels tight, and he refuses to remember that that great beast, _the Snagret_ , was only the beginning of the horrors—No, the beauty! Its brilliant blue scales, the blinding white of its head, how perfectly it had evolved into a magnificent ambush predator! . . . The Snagrets were only a piece in the puzzle, the bustle. That distant world was alive. Those _monsters_ were living creatures. By the stars, he held no grudge against fate! Why should he? Why should he leave such a glorious thing in the past? Why should he forget those small plant people, red and blue and yellow, their large black-irised eyes, their leaf-tipped stalks, their childlike wonder, the tiny hands, the songs they hummed through the darkest caverns, the _massacres_ he’d led them into, the way that they had _saved his life_ , time and time again?! 

He doesn’t realize that the wet dripping down his face isn’t melted snow until he finds that it starts warm, clouding his squinted eyes and fulfilling the threat to spill from them. The acknowledgment is strangled.

The man takes the sleeve of his slick winter’s coat, smearing away the shameless tears, and stands. 

No, former Hocotate Spaceship Captain Olimar, father and hobby biologist, is not alright, so he leaves his table and that emptied cup. He leaves the snow. He leaves the leaves, and the cold breath, and he gets in his car.

And he desperately drives home. He has much to talk about.

———

Home: His wife, his kids, their dog (why does Bulbie scare him?), and the only other man who has the single possible iota of agony in common with him.

Home: A bowl of mercifully half-eaten vegetable stew, worried looks, and oblivious children. Louie still has not spoken.

Home: A full stomach, a loving kiss, and sleeping children. The adults of the household all sit around the couches, checking their phones and chatting about the latest fashion trends in the workplace. Louie stands up, suddenly, and flees, leaving the door open. 

Home: A place where Olimar is alone with his most favorite person in the world, but cannot talk to her without the threat of therapy in-hand. He does not want to forget. 

Home: Alone in his room, unable to rest.

Home: “Olimar,” comes Louie’s voice through the phone. “Do you have bags packed?” Click.

Olimar calls him back, feverish. “Louie, what did you mean by tha-“

“You didn’t get the message?”

“No, I’ve been rejecting dozens of spam calls from the third planet over. . .“

Click.

Olimar, rabid, scrolls through his call history. Dozens of red numbers and scrolling and scrolling and— _there_. The President of Hocotate Freight/Transportation Company. His boss, the oafish man who knew not how to spend a cent in the right room, but always had _him_ fix it—Always sending him back to-

To the distant planet.

_Olimar! Tell Louie how fantastically he’s done, bringing back all of that treasure. You know, with all the current dwindling in the barbaric population over there, I could make a killing! Safe tourist attractions, housing, museums, digsites, you name it! All you have to do now is cut down a few of those big ugly flowers—Actually, I hired new workers!_

Olimar throws his phone across the room and runs outside in nothing but his nightgown and panic, through cold snow and fallen leaves and big, empty, roads.

He lives in a snowglobe, but it feels like the water is starting to pour out.

**Author's Note:**

> I swear that I'll elaborate on that last home scene, come chapter two. I had so much in my head, but I have to save it for his son!


End file.
